Oracle Blog

Musings of a Product Manager

NetBeans and Java EE 5 Momentum

As you can imagine, we keep track of our download statistics and what we've seen since NetBeans 5.5 and the Java EE 5 SDK Update 1 were released are some pretty encouraging numbers. As you can see at the Java EE downloads site we have a number of different downloads to meet the needs of various different users, but the bottom line is we had around 150,000 downloads of the various Java EE 5 bits last month. That is 5,000 of you a day getting not only the latest Java EE bits but the tools and technologies needed to begin composing applications with BPEL. As you will note on the downloads page, we just released Update 2 so I would encourage everyone to go get the update. And as always, being productive is all about the tools so get one of the "with Tools" bundles.

What is even more encouraging is that we've had some direct feedback from customers that what we have built is meeting their needs. In one case, a customer had bought and been trying to use the BPEL engine from a large software vendor and had been having trouble. They took the initiative to begin looking at other options and tried offering from another large software vendor and had similar problems. Now, I won't name names, but you can probably guess who these two large vendors are.

They downloaded our Java EE 5 SDK Tools Bundle and gave it a shot and found that our BPEL editor and engine nearly met every one of their needs and they want to move forward using it. This is a testament to the value of open source and freely available software.